Why We Built This

The Problem with Lobbying Rankings

Every major ranking of lobbying firms—Bloomberg Government, Influence & Co., The Hill's Top Lobbyists—uses the same metric: revenue.

Revenue tells you who charges the most. It tells you nothing about who actually delivers results.

A $50 million firm with 40% annual client churn isn't "better" than a $5 million boutique with 95% retention and deep committee relationships.But revenue rankings would never tell you that.

If you're a lobbyist or firm wondering "Where are we on the list?"—this is why. Revenue lists reward scale, not effectiveness. They measure inputs, not outcomes.

We think there's a better way.

We Measure What Actually Matters

Instead of revenue, we analyze behavioral signals from five years of federal lobbying disclosure data—patterns that reveal which firms and lobbyists are actually getting the job done.

Client Retention

Clients vote with their feet. When companies stay with a firm for multiple years—through leadership changes, budget cycles, and political shifts—it signals trust and results.

High retention correlates with client satisfaction; chronic churn is a red flag.

Issue Expertise

Depth matters. We measure sustained engagement in specific policy areas—healthcare, defense, tax, tech. Years of concentrated work builds the relationships and knowledge that generalists can't match.

Categorized as Strong, Moderate, or Emerging per issue area.

Government Experience

The revolving door matters. Former Members, senior committee staff, and agency officials bring institutional knowledge and relationships that outsiders simply don't have.

Tiered: Member, Senior Staff, Agency Official, Junior Staff.

Active Engagement

Activity, not registrations. We track quarterly filing patterns to distinguish firms that are actively working issues from those maintaining dormant client relationships.

High filing activity indicates real engagement, not passive retainers.

These aren't guesses. They're patterns derived from analyzing every federal lobbying firm over the last five years—over 2 million quarterly filings processed and structured into actionable intelligence.

How Rankings Work

Issue-Specific Ranking Formula

35% Client Volume25% Filing Activity20% Retention20% Gov't Experience

When you view Healthcare rankings, you're seeing firms ranked by their performance specifically in healthcare—not diluted by their overall size.

Overall Rankings

Overall rankings add Issue Diversity (25%) to reward firms that are strong across multiple policy areas—not just dominant in one niche.

A healthcare specialist won't top Overall rankings just because they're large in one area. Versatility matters for firms serving clients with multi-issue needs.

What We Can't Measure

We believe in transparency about the limits of public data. LDA filings show who is doing lobbying—not who is good at lobbying.

Coalition buildingGrassroots activationCommunications strategyStrategic counselIndustry reputationWin/loss records

Use these rankings as a starting point for research, not a final verdict. Always conduct your own due diligence.

Political Intelligence, Built on AI

Juice Meter is built on the same data infrastructure that powers Fed10's policy intelligence platform. Here's what's under the hood:

Data Pipeline

Quarterly ingestion of 50,000+ LDA filings directly from the Senate Lobbying Disclosure database. Five years of historical data processed, structured, and indexed.

Entity Resolution

Fuzzy matching and deduplication algorithms resolve the same lobbyist spelled five different ways, the same firm operating under multiple names, and clients with inconsistent registrations.

AI-Powered Classification

Large language models parse unstructured "covered position" text—free-form descriptions of government experience—into structured role classifications (Member, Senior Staff, Agency, Junior Staff) with committee and chamber attribution.

Vector Embeddings

High-dimensional vector embeddings enable semantic search across lobbying activities—find lobbyists working on "AI regulation" even when filings say "artificial intelligence policy" or "machine learning governance."

Deterministic Scoring

Rankings use rule-based algorithms with explicit weights—not black-box ML. Same inputs always produce same outputs. Fully auditable and explainable.

Juice Meter helps you explore who's out there.

Fed10 helps you act on that intelligence.

Real-time bill tracking, AI-powered legislative analysis, and predictive modeling for government affairs teams who need to move fast.

Explore Fed10

Important Notice

Rankings reflect patterns in public lobbying disclosure data. They do not represent endorsements, guarantees of effectiveness, or predictions of future performance. This information is for research purposes only—always conduct independent due diligence before making business decisions.